Why Words Can Hurt You

This article is part of a package on the right-wing militia movement. For more, read A Conspiracy of Hate about the rise of the extreme right from the January-February issue of Utne Reader.

Hate is an incurable disease. The goal of organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center is to ensure it doesn’t morph into a plague. Founded as a small law firm in Montgomery, Alabama, the SPLC opened its door in 1971 to fight regional cases of racial discrimination. Today the nonprofit manages a multimillion-dollar budget and publishes Intelligence Report, an Utne Independent Press Award winner for investigative journalism that, like its parent organization, advocates tolerance and tracks hate groups from coast to coast (see “A Conspiracy of Hate,” in the most recent issue of Utne Reader).

Mark Potok, the quarterly’s editor, recently chatted with Utne Reader editor David Schimke about the SPLC, Intelligence Report, and the state of hate. What follows is a full, unedited transcription of the conversation.

David Schimke: How would you, as the editor of the magazine, define the mission of the Southern Poverty Law Center?

Mark Potok: The mission of the Southern Poverty Law Center, overall, really has to do with the fourteenth amendment. It is essentially seeking justice for the least among us—seeking equality in the treatment of our citizens, by the law. More narrowly, our purpose in my department, the Intelligence Project, is really to both exposes and to do battle with white supremacist groups and other formations on the radical right. We're very explicit about the idea of we're not simply there to document or monitor these groups. Our purpose is to destroy them or to politically nullify them.

DS: Did the need for the Intelligence Project emerge in a certain point in the history of the center? If so, why did it emerge or has it always been part of the mission?

MP: What the Intelligence Project really was once upon a time was a single investigator who worked for our legal department. So this was kind of the fact department. The guy went out and collected hard information (interviews, and so on) to support our legal cases. From that, it grew into… basically the idea is we need to inform law enforcement about what was then a resurgence of the Klan. This was in the late Seventies and early Eighties in the United States, especially around David Duke, more recently, beginning in the mid-to-late Nineties. When I got here, we had essentially expanded the mission to look at the radical right, in general. So that is really what we do, and the idea is not only to destroy these groups, like I mentioned earlier, and to track them—but also to battle their influence within the mainstream. In fact, that's become a really important focus over the last four or five years.